Bias in the military

 

A smile is a potent weapon

 

African views on U.S.-China competition in Africa

Interview with Raven Tale Publishing

Interview with Author Charles Ray

August 25, 2021

Today, we have an interview with Charles Ray. Charles has been writing fiction since his teens, and actually won a national short story writing contest sponsored by his Sunday school magazine. He has done articles, cartoons, reviews, and photography for a number of publications in Asia, Africa, and America. He writes in several genres: mystery, fantasy, urban fantasy, and humor, in addition to non-fiction. His favorite happens to be mystery. Charles is a very experienced author and has a lot to say about his work, so without further delay we present, an interview with Charles Ray.
 

Where did you get the idea for your characters? Was it based on any personal experience?

I had this idea for a story about a samurai who came to America and got involved in adventures with a cowboy. When I was asked to do a Western horror story, after running a number of plots through my mind, I had this epiphany. What if there was an isolated area—like the Dakota badlands—where a few dinosaurs had survived but were cut off from civilization, but an earthquake or some other natural disaster removed the barriers? Then, I thought, who would be most capable of dealing with these monsters? Well, what about a samurai who comes from a culture that believes in dragons? It wasn’t based on personal experience, but as how many of my characters and plots get started – I sit somewhere in a corner and start asking myself, what if(?) and then take the craziest question that comes to mind and start writing.

 
What got you interested in becoming an author?

When I was young, I was something of a recluse. I preferred books to dealing with people and spent a lot of time making up stories. When I was twelve or thirteen, my English teacher talked me into entering a Sunday school magazine short story contest, and my story won first place. Ever since, I’ve aspired to be an author. For years, from the early 1960s until 2008, I wrote newspaper and magazine articles, and the occasional poem for publication. My first book, which wasn’t even fiction, was published in 2008. I published my first fiction, a mystery, in 2010, independently because of the bad experience I had had with the publisher of my first two nonfiction books. I began branching out shortly afterwards and have done urban fantasy, traditional fantasy, and children’s books. I did some historical fiction that because of the period also qualified as Westerns, which led to doing a series on the Buffalo Soldiers and a series of books about Bass Reeves, one of the first African-American deputy U.S. marshals west of the Mississippi. That eventually became a focus on writing Westerns. I was, as I said before, asked to write a Western horror story, and since I had not done horror before took it on as a challenge.

 
When you start writing your story, do you plan to write it into a series of books or did you want to write just one?

Sometimes when I start a book I have it in mind to do a series, as was the case with my Caleb Johnson Mountain Man series. At other times, I only have the single story in mind. When I started ‘The Awakening of Dragons,’ that was the case, but as I neared the end, I saw the potential for at least one or two more stories with the same main character, so I ended it on a kind of cliff hanger. Not the unresolved issue kind of cliff hanger, but the kind where something happens that makes a reader wonder if there’s more to come.

What is the best cure for writer's block?

Writing every day, even if it’s just impressions of the weather or making journal entries, is the way I avoid writer’s block. Another is to have more than one writing project going at a time. That way, when you’re having trouble coming up with that next bit of dialogue or narrative, or you can’t figure out what to do about a certain plot twist, you can move to a fresh story and work on it for a while. I find this often helps me get past problems with a story. The main thing, though, is to write, write, and write some more.

 
What do you do to pass the time when you're not writing? Do these hobbies influence your writing in any way?

I have a full menu of things to do. I spend time with my grandchildren, who also provide me inspiration for some of my stories or for the weekly column I write for a newspaper in the Philippines. I keep a camera with me wherever I go, and take tons of photos, some of which I have used in my nonfiction books, and I like painting and drawing. I was once an editorial cartoonist for a newspaper in North Carolina and did covers and cartoons for magazines in the 1970s. Both photography and art give me ideas for stories. For example, I love photographing butterflies and the sight of two butterflies fighting in midair gave me the idea for a couple of stories I’ve done. Nature photography is my favorite and is the inspiration for a short story I’m currently writing for a special volume planned soon where I merge a love of nature with the life of a mountain man to try and show what motivates a person to become a mountain man in the first place.

 

Do you ever get tired of writing in the same genre? 

Since I don’t write in just one genre, that problem never arises. I only write in the genres that I read, too. For example, I tried reading a romance novel once and couldn’t get past the third page, so I have never even tried to write in that genre.

 

Would you ever be opposed to turning one of your books into a movie if a studio were to ask you?

Are you kidding? I would love to have not just one, but some of my books turned into movies. That way I could reach an even bigger audience.

Do you mix any commentary about the world into your books, like the state of the world, commentary on capitalism, politics, etc.? 

Not explicitly. I do have a thing about bullying, and many of my books will include a bully who gets his comeuppance, but I never lecture; I just show the bullying, show people getting tired of it and how they deal with it. I figure that people who hate bullies as much as I do will get the message and any bullies who accidentally happen to pick up that particular book will pretty quickly stop reading.  I do try to show a diversity in characters—gender, ethnicity, and the like—and show how a wide variety of people have played a part in history, but again I never preach or lecture. I try to be historically accurate, but do not let that stand in the way of telling a good story. As an example, I once wrote a story about a ten-year-old and his family moving west. It wasn’t a bestseller but did enjoy modest sales. One reviewer, though, hated it because she didn’t think a ten-year-old could do some of the things I had my main character doing. The problem with her thinking was she was basing it on what kids can do today, rather than a time when you had to take on adult responsibilities early in life.

 
If you were to leave any of your novels open-ended, do you like hearing fan feedback on what they think either the ending means or what happened after the ending? Or would you prefer they just take the story as it is?

Other than leaving teasers at the end of the mysteries, and now the horror novels, I don’t really leave stories open-ended. Having said that, I have no objections to a fan giving me ideas for what happens next. I once did a short story based on a prompt and posted it on a short story site. A few readers expressed dismay that I had killed my main character at the end of the story and one pleaded with me to figure a way to resurrect him. As it turned out, I had ended the story with a shotgun blast through a door behind which the character was standing, so it was an easy matter to have the door absorb most of the pellets and him just getting a few just under the skin. Painful but not fatal. That resulted in a series of ten short stories that were the most widely read on that site until it went out of business. I don’t do too many short stories anymore, except for the occasional anthology. They’re much harder to write than a novel, but when it’s done right can be quite satisfying.

 

What's next for you? Do you have a new book in the works or any other projects you’d like people to know of and get excited about?

I plan to do a few more Western horrors, have, in fact, already written a second—different character and plot—and I’m concentrating on my two most popular characters for a while. I wrapped up two series, at least for a while. Last year I did a mystery with a new private detective, a young version of a long-running series and a kind of follow-on that served to wrap up the original series. I’m toying with the idea of doing a few more with this new character and seeing where it goes. Other than that, for the next year at least, I will be focusing on expanding my popular characters.

I would like to thank Charles for taking the time to conduct this interview. We greatly appreciate the time taken out of his busy schedule talk with us and we hope that this was an interesting look into one of our many esteemed authors. Thank you for reading, and thank you again, Charles, for doing this interview.  

Swallowtail butterflies

High wire walkers

Book Trailer Hidden Genius Biography of Frank Calvin Mann 1908-1992

Herd Immunity, What it's all about, really

 

Hummingbirds and Butterflies

 Ever since moving to Woodbine, MD in April this year, I have been focusing my camera on butterflies that flock around several bushes near the house, and hummingbirds that come to a feeder just outside the game room bay window.

A Pictorial Tribute to Women Athletes

 The Olympics are over for a while, but some of the fallout, especially that surrounding some of the women athletes, will probably continue to bubble for a while. I would  just like to take this opportunity to do a pictorial tribute to women who have overcome tremendous odds and excelled in the world of sports and who are, in my humble opinion, superior examples of what can be achieved when you don't let other people define who you are or what you are capable of doing.

We need more empathy, not more sympathy

 

Sometimes you have to break the rules

 
 

I was raised by my grandmother to always follow the rules. It is so ingrained in my personality that even when driving through Iowa’s farm country, whenever I come to a rural stop sign (yeah, they got ‘em) at an intersection where I can see to the horizon in all directions and no other traffic is in sight, I stop. Not the California rolling stop where you just slow down and then blow past the sign, but a full stop.

     One thing life taught me, though, is that you sometimes have to break the rules. Rules are, after all, mostly guidelines for what you ought to do under ideal conditions. You need to learn to use your brain to decide what the right thing to do is under any situation.

     I encountered just such a dilemma in 1968 as the army was preparing me for my first tour in Vietnam. Among the two years of training I had to undergo before that first assignment (including nine months of intensive language training) was an assignment to the Jungle Operations Training Center (JOTC) in Fort Sherman, Panama (the school was closed in 1999) for the two-week course on jungle survival.

     Operated by the 8^th Special Forces Group during the time I was a student, the jungle school was considered the toughest training course in the whole of the US Army. Students were introduced to the dangers of operating in the jungle, from the venomous bushmaster snake to the terrain that could be just as deadly. We were taught practical things like the need to keep your boot laces securely tied at night when you’re sleeping in a hammock strung up between two needle palms. One of my classmates ignored this rule the first night we camped out in a jungle base and was awakened around midnight by one of his loose laces rolling across his leg. Thinking ‘bushmaster,’ he screamed and jumped from his hammock in the dark, making his second mistake, never try to move around a jungle full of needle palm trees in the dark. He ran full on into one, impaling himself on the sharp needles. They don’t go in deep, but the barbs on the needles cause them to embed themselves firmly in the skin. He had needles from his chin to his shins. It took the medics hours to pluck them all out before transporting him to the hospital for treatment.

     My own ‘rumble in the jungle’ didn’t happen until the next to the last day of training. The final three days were devoted to a land navigation exercise in the jungles bordering the Chagres River. Teams of students had to make their way from the starting point to the finish line on the banks of the river where they would then be transported across and back to Fort Sherman where the graduation exercise would be held. Students were told that if it became too much for them, they could make their way to the road that bordered the course and go to the river where boats would be waiting to take them back. If they quit before finishing the course, though, they would not officially graduate and would not be eligible for award of the coveted Jungle Expert Patch which was awarded to top performers. As a captain, I was in command of a team that included two naval academy cadets and an Air Force sergeant.

     We did well during the daytime phase at the start, but when night fell, it began to rain. Visibility in the jungle at night is extremely limited (in triple canopy jungle you can’t see your hand in front of your face), and when its raining, movement in the dark becomes a real problem. Disaster struck when we were less than a kilometer from the finish line, and ahead of all the other teams. Coming over a hill, the Air Force sergeant slipped on the slick ground, landed on his backside and began sliding down the hill in the dark. He made the mistake of not keeping his feet together and a tree halfway down the slope stopped him—he was going pretty fast and the tree, a two-inch sapling, made contact first with his groin. I’m pretty sure everyone in that jungle heard his scream of pain.

     We got him to level ground and built a fire. In the light of the fire, I saw that his testicles were swollen to the size of a softball and he was clearly in a lot of pain. There was no way that he could complete the course. At the same time, he was unable to walk. As the one in charge, I had to make a decision. He could not complete the course but he needed help getting to the road, meaning that whoever helped him would also be marked as ‘quitting.’

     I could not do that to the rest of the team, so I put one of the naval cadets in charge of the team and told them to go ahead and finish the course. I then put the sergeant on my back and carried him to the road. We waited for ten minutes but the promised jeep that would be patrolling the road never showed up, so I picked him up again and walked to the river where I found an old man and his son who were out for some pre-dawn fishing and talked them into taking us across.

     On the other side, I hiked over a mile to the fort with the sergeant on my back and took him to the clinic where they treated him. It was sunup by now, and too late to go back and rejoin my team, so I went to the barracks and went to sleep, thinking that I had just wasted two weeks of my life and would only have the experience to show for it.

     Imagine my surprise later that morning when, showered, shaved, and in clean uniforms, we stood in formation for graduation. The school commandant, announcing the recipients of the Jungle Expert Patch, called my name. When I walked up to get my patch, he also gave me one for the sergeant who was still in a hospital bed with an icepack between his legs. My team and I were singled out as the best in the entire class, not just in terms of the mechanics of jungle survival and operations, but also for leadership and teamwork.

     I broke the school’s rules, but for the right reason. Putting the welfare of those under my command ahead of my own was the right thing to do. It was a lesson I never forgot for the rest of a career in the military and government that lasted until my retirement in 2012.

The ugly—but true—history of the filibuster

 

George Bernard Shaw once wrote, ‘politics is the last refuge of scoundrels,’ paraphrasing the 1775 statement by Samuel Johnson that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.’ Both these statements, regardless of the original meaning, are all too true. One has but to look at the current back-and-forth going on in US political circles about the fate of the filibuster to see this.

      The concept of the filibuster is not new. It existed in fact in ancient Rome. According to historians, this technique was first used by Cato the Younger to thwart the agenda of Julius Caesar, his political rival.

      The  filibuster, a name that comes from the Dutch word for pirate, is in essence a hijacking of debate, a tactic that allows the minority, in the absence of a compelling argument, to thwart the rule of the majority. It has been elevated to the highest form of mischief in the United States, especially in the United States Senate.

      In the manner of the Sophists, who could spin philosophy to accommodate any political situation, and who could use verbal legerdemain to prove the up was down in order to gain an advantage, American politicians on both sides of the debate about the filibuster, use spin to press their case. Those who argue for it say that it protects the rights of the minority party and encourages consensus, while those who oppose claim that it subverts majority rule and causes gridlock. Both are right, and both claim that history and the US Constitution support their view.

      Used appropriately, this obstructive tactic can protect an oppressed minority—except that my research doesn’t show a case of it being used for that purpose in the US. On the contrary, during the Civil Rights movement, southern senators often tried to use it to block laws that would protect minorities in this country, such as preventing passage of a law making lynching a federal crime, or their unsuccessful efforts to block the civil rights laws of the 1957 and 1964.

      The practice of endless debate to block legislation became popular in the US in the 1850s, during which time it was given a name, inspired by the Filibusters, mercenary sailors who tried to overthrow governments in Central and South America. It was primarily used to block legislation on economic, slavery, and civil rights issues.

      When a single senator blocked Woodrow Wilson’s plan to arm merchant ships to protect them from German attacks during World War I, Wilson demanded that the congress adopt a rule to prevent the hijacking of future legislation. Prior to this time, the Senate and the House used a ‘previous question’ motion to stop debate. In 1806, the Senate deleted this rule, but the House retained it. In response to Wilson’s demand, the Senate adopted a ‘cloture rule’ requiring a two-thirds vote, which was subsequently changed to a ‘three-fifths’ rule to end filibusters.

      The Senate’s cloture rule works after a fashion in a normal, sane environment, but in today’s hyperpartisan world where one party reflexively opposes anything proposed by the other party, and with a one-seat majority in the Senate, even the threat of filibuster, known as a ‘stealth filibuster’, can put the brakes on any legislation.

      The use of the filibuster exploded during the Civil Rights movement and were used systematically by southern segregationists to block or attempt to block any attempts to extend equal rights to black Americans, such as their successful blocking of legislation that would have outlawed poll taxes that were designed specifically to keep blacks from voting.

      Currently, if there is a credible threat that 41 senators will refuse to vote for cloture on a bill, it will never reach the floor for a vote. If this is democracy, I think I must have missed something in my history classes decades ago.

      Those who claim the Constitution supports the filibuster need to go back to school. It does permit the congress to set its own rules on debates, but never specifically mentions such an obstructive tactic, and history shows that its use has always been problematic and mercenary.

      It’s long past time for the Senate to adopt rules similar to the House to manage this disruptive tactic. Never again should anyone have to listen to an endless reading of ‘Green Eggs and Ham or endure over 24 hours of s lawmaker droning on and on about nothing of consequence. And we certainly should not have our futures put in jeopardy by threats.

      The Senate is supposed to be a deliberative body of wise individuals who are there to serve the interests of the People. It’s time they got back to it.